Search results for ""Little Toller Books""

In his haunting debut, Water and Sky, published in 2014, Neil Sentance explored the history of his family and the landscape which shaped them. Ridge and Furrow continues the project to chart in prose the voices of a seldom recorded people and place. From the long shadows of war and want, to facing the great changes to rural life in the twentieth century, to first forays into a world beyond the flatlands of Lincolnshire, the book delicately portrays the dreams of lone, and often lonely, figures in one family's history. Ridge and Furrow melds memoir and fiction, place and nature writing, told with characteristic lyricism and muddy realism.

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A Sculpture that Sings is a unique book about church bells, bell-ringing and the place of the tradition in the English landscape and its communities. In 2017 the artist David Ward and the composer Orland Gough came together to work with a group of bell-ringers in rural Dorset and later at St Paul's Cathedral in London.

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Food is fundamental to life. The way we produce it is the most pressing issue of our times. In recent years, several family-run farms in the downlands of West Dorset have decided to radically change their approach to working the land. When the artist Chris Drury and poet-novelist Kay Syrad began collaborating with this group of farmers in the villages of Godmanstone and Sydling St Nicholas, they began to discover why these changes were being made and what they might mean for the local communities - and all of us - who depend on the farmed landscape for food. Chris Drury's artwork and Kay Syrad's prose-poetry combine here to form a sensitive and authentic portrait of a group of men and women whose lives are shaped by the land. It is a rich exploration of work, soil and the sustainability of their farming practice. With its focus on a very particular landscape, the book reveals to us the creativity and resilience of organic farming, and shows just how much we all need to value the complexities of food production and our future relationship with the land.

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Allotments are sanctuaries for growing, often on the fringes of suburbia, where life is getting ever more stressful and expensive. Here, a simple urge to grow-your-own or become self-sufficient, brings us closer to a community of people, wildlife and plants that are often more diverse than the cities and towns that surround them. An allotment is a utopia. It is a green place where anyone can occupy a piece of land, and grow with freedom of expression. Allotmenteering started with The Diggers in seventeenth-century Surrey, in response to the Enclosure Acts which deprived ordinary people of access to land. But the idea spread, first across England and the British Isles, then through Europe and the world. 'The Allotment', originally published in 1988, is the classic study of allotments. Encompassing the oral recordings of plot-holders alongside descriptions of regional variations on the plot itself, such as pigeon-fancying, seed collecting or leek competitions, it looks at British society and history through the prism of allotments. With a new introduction by Olivia Laing, this is a story that is just as relevant today, and is essential for those interested in social history, land ownership and gardening in twenty-first century Britain.

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In 1939 the writer Enid Barraud, disillusioned with her city life, left London and went to live in a village in Cambridgeshire, joining what became known as The Women's Land Army, one of thousands of women who worked the land, while war raged overhead and abroad. In her recently rediscovered memoir, Set My Hand Upon The Plough, first published in 1946, Enid writes with remarkable candour and honesty about her life on the farm on the Home Front. Barraud preferred to identify as male, was known to the other farm workers as John, and lived with her female partner. The book now joins the ranks of important LGBT memoirs and casts new light on the lives of men and women who fought or worked for the liberation of Europe. This new edition has an introduction by Luke Turner, author of Out of the Woods and Men at War.

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The perfect companion to starting to learn everyday English and Ukrainian words, this beautiful book is also a treasure trove for children starting to explore the wider world, starting at home, with its familiar objects and rooms. One of the Pineapple Lane series of books in English and Ukrainian.

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In the summer of 2017, Will and his wife Amy lost their baby, Elowen, a few days before their due date. After a traumatic induced birth, they returned from hospital to their cottage in the New Forest, grief-stricken and struggling to make sense of what happened to them. Unmoored by sadness, what became clear in the weeks and months following Elowen's death is that there is no established vocabulary with which to understand this experience, either for Will or the people around him. Indeed, as he discovers, there is no word in the English language for a parent who has lost a child. Without any linguistic or emotional scaffold, the disorientation of his grief feels ever more lonely and alienating. Elowen charts the darkness of Will's grief over the course of two years with unflinching honesty, but it also describes in sonorous prose what sustained him: the natural world, and in particular the silence and attentiveness of tracking wolves in the forests of Sweden. These animals, only ever fleetingly seen, nonetheless provided profound solace, and in the act of searching for them he began to find a way to live with his grief. This profoundly moving, ultimately uplifting book challenges the way we think about loss and help us to re-evaluate our relationship to the natural world. Elowen is not only a remarkable portrait of grief, but also an impassioned hymn to the wild and a treatise on the restorative potential of nature in uncertain times.

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In the depths of winter in 1705 the young Johann Sebastian Bach, then unknown as a composer and earning a modest living as a teacher and organist, set off on a long journey by foot to Lubeck to visit the composer Dieterich Buxterhude, a distance of more than 250 miles. This journey and its destination were a pivotal point in the life of arguably the greatest composer the world has yet seen. Lubeck was Bach's moment, when a young teacher with a reputation for intolerance of his pupils' failings began his journey to become the master of the Baroque. More than three hundred years later, the writer Horatio Clare set off to recreate this walk, following in Bach's footsteps. The result of this journey is Something of his Art, an imaginative evocation of what the twenty-year-old composer would have seen and felt on his long journey is a sustained visualisation of the landscape, light and wildlife of early eighteenth century northern Germany. Bach becomes Clare's walking companion, a vestigial but real presence, as he acutely observes the season and places he passes through.

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As climate change erodes the familiar pattern of the seasons, we turn instinctively to the life cycles of herbaceous plants to guide us through the year. The growing, flowering, seeding and dying back of wild flowers, weeds, herbs and garden perennials sustain and enrich our lives. Herbaceous is a journey which follows the colour pulse of plants through the year, looking for the new and emerging rhythms. Beginning with the bright yellow, followed by the vernal whites of spring and the pinks of summer, the blues of early autumn and finally the browns of seeds set as winter comes. Herbaceous is gardening with words - asking us to look again at our relationship with plants and celebrates their power to nourish our spirits.

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In mid to late March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War which was to claim his life gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills. The poet recorded his journey through his beloved South Country and his account was published as In Pursuit of Spring in 1914. Regarded as one of his most important prose works, it stands as an elegy for a world now lost. What is less well-known is that Thomas took with him a camera, and photographed much of what he saw, noting the locations on the back of the prints. These have been kept in archives for many years and will now be published for the very first time in the book. Thomas journeys through Guildford, Winchester, Salisbury, across the Plain, to the Bristol Channel, recording the poet's thoughts and feelings as winter ends.

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Wild Life in a Southern County traces the course of a spring which rises on an Iron Age hillfort and gradually broadens into a brook, flows through a nearby village and hamlet, skirts a solitary farmhouse and its orchard, before draining into water meadows and a lake where the wildfowl nest. Immersed in the detail of this ancient landscape, its people and the habitats of its wildlife, what emerges from Jefferies' dazzling prose is his sense of perpetual wonder and the deep affection he felt for his homeland, from the clatter of a milkmaid's boots to a pike lying in ambush.

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In 1927, Ronald Lockley took a 21 year lease on the small island of Skokholm, just off the Pembrokeshire coast in South Wales. A keen ornithologist, he began studies of the bird life on the island, and on neighbouring Skomer, famous today for its puffins. In the 1930s he published two books about his life on the island, Dream Island (1930) and Island Days (1934), which are now combined in this one volume. Lockley was a hugely influential figure in natural history and was lauded by Sir Peter Scott and Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down, who also used him as a character in his book The Plague Dogs. Today, Dream Island offers an insight into an extraordinary and influential figure, and strongly evoke his island life.

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A collection of beautifully illustratedcontemporary folk songs with music scores by Jehanne Mehta, inspired by seasonsand legends, landscapes and heartscapes.

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Limestone Country is a perceptive, lyrical evocation and investigation into four landscapes in Europe and beyond. Seemingly disparate these places are bound together by their limestone geology, by personal experience and Fiona Sampson's unique imagination.

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In Wild Twin, the Costa Prize shortlisted author Jeff Young sets out from Liverpool in the 1970s pursuing a vision of becoming a 'wild twin'. In Europe he falls into a fever dream of drugs, dive hotels, poverty, madness and thieving. An extraordinary memoir, a hallucinatory dream book of loss and loneliness, to match his debut Ghost Town.

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For hundreds of years, fishing communities along the Dorset coast lived from the shoals of mackerel that migrate between May and October. Fishing the traditional way, with seine nets in shallow waters, tightly knit crews used wooden lerret boats to pull bumper catches ashore. Bound by this communal, seasonal wait and scramble for fish, their friendships and rivalries, identity and language, were shaped by the sea. The stories, photographs and recordings collected here give us a vivid picture of a way of life that has largely disappeared. We hear of family gatherings on the beach, and of men and women who lived for the fishing and whose intimate local knowledge, gleaned over a lifetime and passed down over the generations, were essential to their livelihoods. These voices echo through time to tell us about people who were completely connected to place and who lived by 'the ways of beach'.

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A bold and colourful counting book, to learn the numbers one to ten in English and Ukrainian side by side, with cheerful animal and plant illustrations – a fun way to get to know the world of numbers for the young. This book is part of the Pineapple Lane series of books for children displaced by war.

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Rivers are great workings of nature, time and geology. They have long been at the very centre of human culture, sustaining us with water, food, power and stories. Our thoughts flow like a river. A river's journey, from source to sea, is a metaphor for life. H.E. Bates's own journey began on the banks and in the waters of two contrasting Midland rivers. The River Nene's jumbled course and character, with its towpaths and locks and bridges, speaks of human industry on its journey to The Wash. The River Ouse, in contrast, with its wide meanders brimmed with reeds and smoky willows, rich in wildlife and wild flowers, is an uplifting, ephemeral water, a river of summer memories and flag irises, the blue pulse of kingfishers and pike lurking in weed-shadows. Peopled by his relatives and neighbours, both the Nene and the Ouse, however different, filled H.E. Bates's imagination with the wonderful stories and characters that make his writing so enjoyable.

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An Almost Impossible Thing follows the lives of six hitherto unknown women gardeners in the years before the First World War, and examines their lives in the context of suffragism, collectivism and Empire.

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A dual langue book in Ukrainian and English for readers of three years and up. How many clouds are in the sky? How many rays does the sun have? Not all questions have answers, but asking them begins a journey of imagination and connections. How Many? is a playful counting book that encourages children to keep asking questions about the world.

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To celebrate Richard Mabey's 80th birthday, a reissue of the seminal Nature Cure, originally published in 2005 to great acclaim. At the height of his career, having recently published Flora Britannica, the author and naturalist fell in to a deep and all consuming depression. Unable to rise from his bed, his face turned to the wall, Richard Mabey found that the touchstones of his life - his love for nature and the land - could no longer offer him solace. But over time, with help from friends and a move to East Anglia, he slowly recovered, finding a new partner, and a new relationship with landscape. Nature Cure, full of nuance and energy, was a pioneering book in the genre that has since become known as New Nature Writing, and received many plaudits on publication. For this new hardback edition Richard has written a new foreword and Little Toller has commissioned a new jacket by the celebrated artist Michael Kirkman.

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Winner of the 2020 Wainwright Prize, Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of Dara McAnulty's world, from spring to summer, autumn to winter, on his home patch, at school, in the wild and in his head. Evocative, raw and beautifully written, this very special book vividly explores the natural world from the perspective of an autistic teenager juggling homework, exams and friendships alongside his life as a conservationist and environmental activist. With a sense of awe and wonder, Dara describes in meticulous detail encounters in his garden and the wild, with blackbirds, whooper swans, red kites, hen harriers, frogs, dandelions, skylarks, bats, cuckoo flowers, Irish hares and many more species. The power and warmth of his words also draw an affectionate and moving portrait of a close-knit family making their way in the world.

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In her mid-twenties, shortly before her father's death, Davina Quinlivan moved from her family home in west London to begin a transitory life in the countryside: here she felt restless and rootless, stuck between Deep England and the technicolour memories of her family's migration story. Beginning in colonial India and Burma, from the indigenous tribes from which the women in Quinlivan's family are descended, and reaching the streets of Southall and Ealing, the stories of her ancestors persisted in the tales, the language, the cooking and culture of her family. Quinlivan conjures a place between continents and worlds in a lyrical debut of migration, and homecoming, marking the arrival of an exceptional new voice.

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Dates are invented things. Nothing in nature decrees that today is today. But for millennia humans have divided time into portions, and given those portions names which are shared widely across cultures, creating a common agreement on the date. This convention is useful in practical ways: we can make arrangements and can communicate time elapsed or time ahead. But the calendar also makes a certain kind of truth and establishes that today is today. As calendars and almanacs developed, art from their specific time and place was naturally incorporated. In this small book showcasing the finest and most interesting art that has gone into almanacs, from the eight century onwards, Alexandra Harris brings in everything from Benedictine calendars to Old Moore's Almanack.

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Although mostly concealed, our bedrock geology profoundly determines what we see around us - not just our landforms, but the built environment too, from Aberdeen, often called the "granite city" to Bath, constructed from honey-coloured limestone- rocks shape the world around us. In Cornerstones, some of Britain's leading landscape and nature writers consider their relationship with the ground beneath their feet. Distinguished by a strong sense of place and close observation, these essays take the reader out into the landscape and convey the tactile heft, grain and rub of the rock, showing how it shapes our familiar landscapes. Adapted from the successful BBC Radio Three series, Cornerstones explores how different rock types give rise to their own distinct flora and fauna, and even affect the food we eat.

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Soon after Dexter Petley began writing down his observations of people on the borders of rural Kent and Sussex during the 1960s and 1970s, he realised that his stories were acquiring a broader significance. Between the riverbank where he taught himself to fish and the secondary modern where gardening and smallholding were on the curriculum, he witnessed the lives of a demobbed generation who were still adjusting to post-war Britain, surviving hand-to-mouth, eking out a living mending cars, recycling scrap metal or hop-picking. This fractured landscape, carried like an heirloom since boyhood, has allowed Petley to untangle the fragments of his own life, from the loss of his first love to the nomadic existence he has been living ever since, in London, Africa and France. Here is an unsentimental memoir of exceptional quality. Reminiscent of Laurie Lee and H.E. Bates, each story is peopled by vivid, earthy characters who gravitate around the lakes and ponds and rivers that have flowed through Dexter Petley's life.

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Jocelyn Brooke's love affair with wild flowers and home-made fireworks began when he was growing up in Kent and exploring the countryside of the the Elham Valley. But there was one particular flower, especially rare and beautiful which became an obsession. Over three decades and through two world wars, in the deserts of Libya and the woodlands of Italy, in the chalk downs of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire, he searched continually for his most beloved and elusive Orchis militaris, the military orchid.Against the backdrop of his quintessentially English upbringing and his army career, with ts wonderful cast of snobbish neighbours, eccentric public school teachers and bullish staff sergeants, Jocelyn Brooke blends memoir, botany and satire to recall his lifelong quest. The Military Orchid is a comic masterpiece and became widely revered: Kingsley Amis decribed Brooke as "brilliant and exciting", John Betjeman called him "as subtle as the devil", and to Anthony Powell he was "one of the most interesting and talented" writers to emerge after the Second World War.

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Trees and woods offer great potential for rebuilding our wider relationship with nature, reinforcing local identity and sustaining wildlife. We need more trees and woods in our lives, to lock up carbon, to mitigate flooding, to help shade our towns and cities and bring shelter, wildlife and beauty to places. Living with Trees is a cornucopia of practical information, good examples and new ideas that will inspire, guide and encourage people to reconnect with the trees and woods in their community, so we can all discover how to value, celebrate and protect our arboreal neighbours.

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Going to Ground is an anthology from Little Toller's online journal, The Clearing. Gathered here is some of the best and most distinctive writing about nature and place, from more than thirty writers celebrating and questioning our landscapes. Contributors include Nancy Campbell, Kathleen Jamie, Tim Dee, Tim Hannigan, Louisa Adjoa Parker.

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From his experiences as a rough sleeper in London in the early eighties to the wilds of Jura, Neil Ansell has woven a beautifully told memoir, and a meditation on belonging.

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A dual language picture book in English and Ukrainian for children aged 3+. What happens when we lose something special? What treasures can be found in everyday life? Little Romko is upset when he first loses his special coin. But he soon realises he's discovered something much more valuable. With humour and imagination this wonderful Ukrainian-English picture book turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. A dual language picture book in English and Ukrainian for children aged 3+.

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About two-thirds of Britain's small, traditional orchards have been lost since 1960. This is a loss in ecological diversity, in community knowledge and the intricacy of local distinctiveness. In 2007 the pomologist Liz Copas and cidermaker Nick Poole began a quest to find and identify old varieties of cider apple trees around Dorset. The search lasted more than a decade, taking them across the county, searching in forgotten orchards, hedgerows and the corners of gardens. The Lost Orchards follows the journey they took to find, propagate and make cider with Dorset's forgotten apple varieties: Golden Ball, Kings Favourite, Yaffle, Dewbit, Golly Knapp, Tom Legg, Best Bearer and Symes Seedlings. The book is also an illustrated guide to the apple varieties they discovered and an important history of West Country Orchards. This hopeful story will resonate far beyond Dorset and will encourage readers to look closely at their surroundings and conserve their local orchards.

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A Ukrainian-English dual language picture book for ages 3+ which tells an inspiring journey about what happens when we face life's dilemmas. A beautifully illustrated, heart-warming story about a girl, a cat and their unexpected journey to the sea. Mira has never been to the sea. She's dreamed about going but it's always been too far away. Things change when Mr Catsky arrives and Mira is plunged into an unexpected journey of friendship and imagination.

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Millstone Grit takes the form of a fifty mile walk through the West Riding and East Lancashire, exploring the industrial towns and moors. Glyn Hughes had grown up in the Cheshire countryside but on moving to the Pennines was deeply shocked by the impact of industry on the natural world; but over time he found beauty in its special landscapes and came to love the people who lived in them. In Millstone Grit the author investigates the specific culture of place - with chapters on Methodism and the Luddites, interviewing a millworker, examining the awakening of an urban working-class consciousness. Hughes is always observant, careful, poetic and no-nonsense, this new edition will find readers keen to rediscover his vision of the north.

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W.G. Hoskins was one of the most original and influential British historians of the twentieth century. He realised that landscapes are the richest record we have of the past, and with his masterpiece, The Making of the English Landscape, he changed forever how we experience the places we live and work in.Where we see a picturesque scene of rolling hills, distant spires and wooded valleys, Hoskins shows us the line of a Bronze Age trackway, the ghostly impression of an open-field system, the gridiron pattern of an industrial town, or the footprint of a Roman villa. By revealing these traces of the past, Hoskins enables us to appreciate different landscapes as if they were pieces of music, a series of compositions which enrich our understanding of the symphonic whole.While planning and building our future villages and towns, in both green and urban places, this pioneering account reminds us why we must be sensitive to the land and its past as we leave our own marks in England's historical landscape.

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The Helford River, Cornwall is a place of wonder and delight: one of the very few places in England where ancient woodland meets the sea. "This is oak country, and the oaks have that surprising variety of size and shape that only Cornwall and Devon oaks can offer. Smooth wooded hillsides, subtly mottled with the different greens or browns of individual oak-trees, sweep down to high-water mark." So begins Oliver Rackham's book covering 25 woods, predominantly in the north of the Lizard peninsula, including: Bonallack, Calamansack, Devichoys, Grambla, Gweek, Merthen, Reskymmer, Trelowarren, Tremayne and Treverry. He brings to life the curious industrial and cultural history of this unique area, and shows how these woods have survived and what the future may have in store. Illustrated throughout with photographs, maps and diagrams, this forms the second volume in the regional series The Ancient Woodlands of Britain. This book is published in collaboration with the Woodland Trust.

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Through the story of one man, Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd whose flocks graze the Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset borders, we meet men and women of humble birth - poachers, gypsies, farmers and laborers - striving to survive on the land. As we read, the cumulative affect of their stories becomes much more than a record of rural life. It reads like a lost hymn, sung by people whose lives were disregarded and whose histories are now forgotten. W H Hudson's masterful book, merging fiction, reminiscence, memoir and oral history, was recognized as a classic when it was first published in 1910. It remains so today. First published by Methuen & Co.

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During the early 1970s Richard Mabey set about mapping his unofficial countryside. He walked crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb sites, navigating inner city canals and car parks, exploring sewage works, gravel pits, rubbish tips. What he discovered runs deeper than a natural history of our suburbs and cities. The Unofficial Countryside prescribes another way of seeing, another way of experiencing nature in our daily lives. Wild flowers glimpsed from a commuter train. A kestrel hawking above a public park. Enchanter's nightshade growing through pavement cracks. Fox cubs playing on a motorway's scrubby fringe. There is a scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. It is an inspiration to find this abundance, to discover how plants, birds, mammals and insects flourish against the odds in the most obscure and surprising places.

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Walter Murray was a young man tired of living in the city. Early in the 1920s, he persuaded a Sussex farmer to rent him a derelict cottage, which stood alone on a hill, with no running water or electricity. Most of the windows were broken, it was dirty, dark and ran with rats. He bought a brush and pail in the village, forced the rats to retreat, brought in rudimentary furniture. The local postman found him a dog, and with his new companion he began to explore his surroundings. In that year at Copsford he made a living from collecting, drying and selling the herbs he found locally: agrimony, meadow-sweet and yarrow. He became alert to the wildlife and plants around him. His life was hard - he supplemented his income with occasional journalism, but it was here he met his future wife, who he calls The Music Mistress, and with whom he would later found a school. Copsford is an extraordinary book. Bearing comparison to Thoreau's Walden, Murray's intense feeling for his place is evident on every page. It is, though, no simple story of a rural idyll - life at Copsford was hard, and Murray does not shy away from the occasional terrors of a house that had its hauntings. A publishing success when first published in the late 1940s, this new edition has an introduction by Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path.

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Silbury Hill in Wiltshire has perplexed people for generations: was it part of a ritual landscape, an island, a way of remembering the dead, a place of celebration? In this acclaimed memoir Adam Thorpe returns to the landscape of his youth to explore its many meanings for him, and for us.

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A perfect companion for starting to learn everyday Ukrainian and English words, this vibrant book introduces young readers to shapes, colours, objects and words, with bold and appealing illustrations to spark imaginations. Part of the Pineapple Lane series of dual language books (English and Ukrainian) for children displaced by war.

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Reuben, aged 38, was living in a home for adults with learning disabilities. He hadn't established an independent life in the care system and was still struggling to accept that he had Down's syndrome. Depressed and in a fog of anti-depressants, he hadn't spoken for over a year. The only way he expressed himself was by writing poems or drawing felt-tip scenes from his favourite West End musicals and Hollywood films. Increasingly isolated, cut off from everyone and everything he loved, Reuben sent a text message: 'brother. do. you. love. me.' When Manni received this desperate message from his youngest brother, he knew everything had to change. He immediately left his life in Spain and returned to England, moving Reuben out of the care home and into an old farm cottage in the countryside. In the stillness of winter, they began an extraordinary journey of repair, rediscovering the depths of their brotherhood, one gradual step at a time. Combining Manni's tender words with Reuben's powerful illustrations, their story of hope and resilience questions how we care for those we love, and demands that, through troubled times, we learn how to take better care of each other.

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A dual-language book in English and Ukrainian for ages three upwards. Sonia and Nika are best friends but live far away from each other: Nika lives on the left bank of the Dnipro River, while Sonia lives on the right. To see each other more often the girls come up with a secret plan which also makes them feel happy!

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Have you ever dreamed of making a discovery? Inspired by a true story, Archie's Apple tells of how one boy discovers a new variety of apple while out walking, and hits the headlines around the world. Archie lives with his father on the edge of a wood; every day and in every season Archie plays in the wood, watching and hearing nature. But one day deep in the woods he finds an apple, quite unlike any apple he's ever seen or eaten. His discovery takes them on an adventure that neither he nor his dad could have predicted. This enchanting and intricate picture book, illustrated with original watercolours, takes the reader on a journey from the discovery to the brink of world-wide fame and back again, and has much to tell us about the wild power of nature and the value of noticing.

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In 1987 the Great Storm that ravaged southern England felled millions of trees, and prompted a reappraisal of the arboreal in our lives. In Beechcomings Richard Mabey set out to uncover our relationship with trees, and specifically the beech, their significance in nature and meaning in folklore. First published in 2007 this book was widely praised and described by Kathleen Jamie in the Guardian as 'Refreshing, droll, politically alert, occasionally self-mocking, he has the enviable ability both to write historical overview and also to slip into the woods like a dryad, bringing us back to the trees themselves.' This new edition forms part of the Richard Mabey Library, published to mark the author's 80th birthday, and includes a cover by the artist Michael Kirkman.

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Aurochs and Auks is a deeply moving and intelligent meditation on the natural processes of death and extinction, renewal and continuity. Prompted by his own near-death in a time of pandemic, John Burnside explores the history of the auroch (Bos primigenius), the wild cattle that has become the source of so much sacred and cultural imagery across Europe, from the Minotaur and the Cretan bull dances to Spanish corrida traditions. He then tells the story of the Great Auk, a curious bird whose extinction in the mid-nineteenth century was caused by human persecution and before stepping into multiple extinctions of the outer and inner world.

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